This talk explores how American media cultures imagine home in the moment it becomes insecure. In light of the housing crisis in 2007-08, which turned assets into liabilities, Professor Faisst asks: How is the idea of home unmade in an age of everincreasing spatial inequality and housing disparity? In particular, her talk focuses on the most extreme case of precarious belonging: homelessness. She discusses how selected photographs, videos, and films negotiate the lack of a permanent abode as a form of economic dislocation and the fear of becoming unhoused. In these examples, both home and homelessness are tied up with a language of rights and possession, and find their aesthetic expressions in material conditions, the language of affect, and the imaginary. Taken together, they constitute the meaning of what it feels like to (not) be at home. Home and homelessness, she argues, should not be considered as simple opposites, but as mutually interdependent, leading us to re-think questions of visibility and agency 

 

Julia Faisst is Professor of American Studies and the Media at TU Dortmund. She received her PhD from Harvard University and her venia legendi from the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. She is the author of Cultures of Emancipation: Photography, Race, and Modern American Literature (2012), and co-editor of Picturing America: Photography and the Sense of Place (2018). Her research interests include North American literary and visual culture studies, African American, race and ethnic studies, migration and diaspora studies, architecture, space and urban studies, ecocriticism and environmental
humanities, gender studies and intersectionality, and inequality and class studies.

 

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